Samarth Bhaskar

Gone Baby Gone

There’s a new Twitter account making the rounds on Film Twitter called “Titular Lines” (aka @Saythetitle). It features screen caps from movies with a line of dialog impsed that has the title of the movie in it. There’s a scene in Gone Baby Gone in which one of the only black characters, through a pretty awful Haitian accent, says “Gone baby…gone” and I really almost lost it. That sounds like an aside, but it is somewhat emblamatic of a quality about this movie.

Although this is a strong moral drama, packaged as an abduction story, and works well as a sort of story within a story within a story, there is an amatuerish quality about it. Perhaps it is in some of the story telling becoming too on-the-nose near the end. Or the hyper-Catholic constructivist approach the main protagonist employs. I don’t know exactly why, but re-watching this as an older viewer, I saw many more flaws than I remember seeing when I first saw it upon release.

None the less, it is one of the better Affleck brother outings. And as far as major Hollywood studio films go, it does have more of a philosophy at its core than average. Which is nothing to deride.